Anti-tamper (AT) devices and techniques have long been used to protect and secure proprietary and secret products and information from discovery by either hacking or reverse engineering. AT techniques and reverse engineering techniques constantly develop in response to each other in an ever more complex and intricate interplay of security measures and counter-measures. One particular area where stronger anti-tamper techniques are desirable is in the development of secure, tamper-evident, tamper-sensitive, and tamper-respondent coatings for circuit components and other hardware.
Another area of interest related to anti-tamper techniques is masking or otherwise obscuring the actual component content, wiring or trace structure and layout of a circuit board, and/or intellectual property associated with the fabrication of an integrated circuit, thereby making it more difficult to unlock and reverse engineer a protected information storage or information processing system.